What to Say to the Kid Who Asks 'Why?'

As printed in My Village News February 2020

I suspect my life is going to be governed by a single-worded question soon. My toddler turns two this month and with her awareness already that of a threenager, I know what’s going to be asked of anything and everything is, “Why?”

And I fear I’m wholly unprepared because; I can’t remember anything useful about outer space, human or animal biology or exactly how our trees turn CO2 into oxygen.

When she pats her tummy at bath time and tells me she has a baby in there I tell her it’s not possible until she’s a “grown-up, old lady like me”, crossing fingers that she doesn’t wise up and ask me just yet about how it happens. I have been trying to take the taboo out of private parts by calling those male and female areas by their real names.

This preparedness for the “But, why?” years ahead has also fuelled my fresh desire to know more about where we live. While I may not remember the Periodic Table of Elements one thing I can cling to is a story. I yearn to teach my daughter something deeper of her surrounds than what she just sees on the surface.

So I was elated to come across Beth Wilson’s Brisbane Houses With Gardens. The book’s humble title undersells the depth and breadth of knowledge it’s author, a revered Brisbane landscape architect, has to share of our suburbs’ past lives.

I loved reading the story behind New Farm’s ‘Santa Barbara’ house, a Spanish Mission style abode on Sydney and Moray Streets I have long admired for it’s exotic and daring difference in a suburb now dominated by modern developments. It turns out it was built for a formidable Queensland businesswoman of the 1920s named Sarah Balls. She lived in it just two years before passing away but what a visually impressive and motivating legacy she has left behind for females of all ages today. That a widowed female in her late 60s, could still be working and building her dream home in a time where women were just seen and rarely heard. That’s a “why” I look forward to sharing.